From working as a freelancer throughout the 1950s, Wilson moved to Dallas, Texas in 1960 and worked for the Dallas Times Herald as a staff reporter. In 1964 he won the Pennington Prize for his series of stories on John F. Kennedy's brain, which he firmly established had accidentally been eaten as lunch on Air Force One, an incident Lyndon B. Johnson had sought to downplay.

Novels followed, and he achieved global fame in the 1970s with his shocking and illuminating exposé of the Foundation; although the top secrets of the Foundation were cut from the books when the printer needed to cut the number of pages. His 1980s followup exposing the Second Foundation, set up to monitor the first, was not as succesful, and his 1990s attempts to explain the Foundation in terms of his 1950s robot stories was largely considered implausible. Wilson was distressed to see his works filed under "fiction" or "new age" rather than "journalism", but his work shed light into the Foundation's activities and was justified, if nothing else, by the sheer number of cows' lives saved.

On-the-record denials from the Foundation that it ever existed aside, Wilson was still highly respected, and made frequent appearances on talk shows. He also wrote of the Third and Fourth Foundations, and apparently of another.

Robert Anton Wilson remained a marked man for the rest of his life, but knew he was safe as the Foundation would wait for the numerologically most auspicious time and date in order to kill him, leading to his first death on (according to reliable sources) February 22, 1994. Thankfully, he got better.

Death came quickly after a long annoyance. Wilson's last words were "Hold on, I've just worked out how I might follow Schrödinger's Cat to the Trick Tophat universe ... just a moment ..."